Page 36 of Presumed Dead

“Bring them over.”

“I will.”

Greg tipped two fingers and walked back to his own boat. George stood at the cleaning station with the three Lakeland boys, and Ethan helped clean the four biggest grouper, and at five oh-eight he walked back across the boardwalk to Pier Three with a paper bag of fillets the deputy had insisted he take and the unfamiliar useful feeling of having spent four hours being a man George Halsey would let on his boat.

He stopped at the head of Pier Two.

Sloane was at the kiosk window, doing something he couldn’t see from where he was standing because the kiosk wall was in the way, and he could see only the top of her head and the angle of her shoulder, and he took in the top of her head and the angle of her shoulder as if she were operational geography he'd been mapping for a long time, and he walked on past Pier Two and to Pier Three and his own slip without going around the kiosk to look at her, because looking at her was something he was going to allow himself to want and not allow himself to do.

He put the fillets in the icebox, washed his hands, and sat at the dinette with the bag from the bakery still folded in the trash and the notebook closed on the table, and he thought about a woman in a denim shirt at her counter who had walked Pier Three at twelve sixteen and had said “show me” before she’d decided to.

Caleb called at seven-thirty.

Ethan took the call on the swim platform with the channel cooling off in front of him and the deck light on Catherine’s houseboat already lit across the way. He spoke low and kept the phone tilted toward the channel and away from the dock. He’d been trained out of being heard.

“Day Two.”

“Day Two.”

“George Halsey.”

“Took me on the afternoon charter. Three out-of-staters from Lakeland. Returned at four oh-three. Met Greg Bonner of Reel Therapy at the cleaning station. He’s coming by tomorrow to look at the boat.”

“Halsey volunteered Pruitt yesterday.”

“He did. Bonner hasn’t yet. He may. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

“Pell.”

“Pell brought a casserole yesterday. She also brought intel — though she brought the intel separately, when I walked the dish back to her around nine-forty-five. Monday night, ten thirty-eight to ten fifty-three, white pickup, no logo, unknown male on the Bertram in slip nine for fifteen minutes. Small bag, same weight in and out per her observation.”

A pause. The pause was Caleb registering the intel. The pause lasted about three breaths.

“She volunteered it?”

“She did. She’s decided I’m the kind of man on this dock who ought to know. She’s also decided, separately, not to tell Sloane.”

“Why?”

“Her stated reason was that Sloane has been carrying things by herself for four years, and Pell didn’t want to add one more without thinking about it. I think the unstated reason is that Pell is running her own quiet operation on this dock that she’d rather Sloane not have to administer.”

“Pell’s sixty-eight years old.”

“She is, and she clocked a vehicle without a logo at ten thirty-eight on a Monday night from the upper deck of her houseboat. She had the time of arrival, the time of departure, the bag-weight assessment, and the suspect’s gait. She doesn’t write any of it down; she's decided not to start.”

“I want her on the asset list as a friendly.”

“She’s on it. She doesn’t know she’s on it. She wouldn’t accept it if you offered.”

“Understood.”

A pause. The second pause was Caleb deciding whether to ask the question Caleb usually didn’t ask, and Caleb decided to ask it.

“The asset.”

“The asset is on Day Two.”

“Vale.”